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Uber’s delivery business in Spain has settled with local labor unions which were challenging its dismissal of more than 4,000 riders in August last year ahead of a labor law reform coming into force — acknowledging the dismissed couriers as staff and agreeing to pay severance equivalent to 45 days’ salary per year worked (via Reuters).

In a statement emailed to TechCrunch, an Uber spokesperson said:

“This agreement with worker unions in Spain aims at compensating couriers who were not able to access our app following the introduction of the Rider Law in 2021. We have since then launched a new model in full compliance with the new local regulatory framework and remain open to dialogue with all relevant parties to continue to improve independent work for all.”

The ‘Riders Law’, as the 2021 Spanish labour law reform is known, was aimed at platforms perceived to be falsely classifying delivery couriers as self-employed — introducing a presumption of employment for those providing such services through digital platforms.

Uber’s decision to let go of thousands of couriers ahead of this change in their employment status was dubbed a de facto collective dismissal by unions FeSMC-UGT and CCOO-Servicios — who challenged its action before the National Court. The court initially dismissed the challenge but in a ruling in July the Supreme Court revoked the lower court’s decision, deciding that the unions could challenge the dismissal and triggering a retrial.

Uber appears to have settled to avoid this, as the retrial in the National Court was scheduled for today.

The unions said 4,404 couriers who were dismissed by Uber last year should receive compensation under the settlement.

“This is a historic agreement,” they write in a press release (which we’ve translated from Spanish). “For the first time a collective dismissal of delivery people has been recognized in court and guarantees the collection of compensation for each of those affected, in amounts that are better than those established in law.”

Delivery workers who are affected by the settlement should receive an email from Uber’s local delivery firm, which is called Portier Eats Spain, informing them of the agreement and the amount of compensation they should receive, per the unions.

In order to claim compensation due they need to reply within a month of receipt of the message, accepting the compensation and confirming their bank details for transferring the payment — which should be remitted within four months.

Affected couriers who no longer have access to the email address they previously used to communicate with Portier Eats Spain are instructed to contact FeSMC-UGT immediately by email — at plataformasdigitales@fesmcugt.org — in order for the union to manage the payment of their compensation.

Change of compliance gear

While Uber has agreed to recognize that these former couriers were employees, it has recently changed how it responds to Spain’s Riders Law.

An Uber spokesperson told us the company now operates two different models in Spain — one of which entails working with third party fleet partners who employ couriers directly. But it has also, since September, launched a tweaked model which enables couriers to remain independent (i.e. self employed) without — it claims –breaching the Rider Law.

Delivery platforms in Spain responded in a variety of ways to the change in the labor law last year — including pulling out of the market altogether (in the case of Deliveroo). Others claimed to have adapted their models, such as homegrown rival Glovo, which claimed it would take on some riders as staff but does not appear to have employed the vast majority of its couriers.

That led to some tension with Uber — which earlier this year penned an open letter accusing Glovo of flouting the labor reform and complaining it was unable to contract enough couriers to secure its service because so many were opting for ongoing ‘self-employment’ with Glovo.

Fast forward a few months and Uber has reworked its playbook to steer closer to Glovo’s.

That may not be the soundest compliance strategy, however, as the latter continues to face regulatory bumps on home turf — such as a $78M penalty it was hit with in September for employment law breaches attached to its employment classification of riders.

The company claimed that sanction pre-dated the entry into force of the Riders Law but fresh challenges to its tweaked model — and to Uber’s — are all but certain.

Zooming out, last year, European Union lawmakers proposed a bloc-wide reform aimed at improving conditions for workers on gig economy platforms — proposing legislation to bring in a rebuttable presumption of employment across EU Member States with the goal of enforcing minimum standards in areas like pay, conditions and social protections.

However the file — and the proposed legal presumption of employment for platform workers — has proved divisive, as Euractive reported recently, with divisions emerging between national delegations and no compromise position yet adopted by the Council.

Uber’s food delivery platform agrees to pay severance to couriers let go ahead of Spain’s Riders Law by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch

Back in June, I predicted that we would see an uptick in startups acquiring other startups this year. At the time, the venture market was souring and starting to show a divide between startups with years of cash on hand — companies that were also, often, overvalued — and those that were low on capital and would likely struggle to raise new funds.

Well, while I was technically not wrong — it is still 2022 for two more weeks — my prediction didn’t really pan out as I thought it would.

According to data from Crunchbase, as of December 13, 1,291 startups have been acquired by other venture-backed companies this year. This compares to 1,292 in 2021. So while this year is on track to see more transactions than last, it won’t be by a meaningful amount.

But a recent acquisition showed both why we haven’t seen much movement yet and why we expect to see significantly more activity heading into next year.

OK, now. Now we’re going to see more startups acquire other startups by Rebecca Szkutak originally published on TechCrunch

Netflix has announced that it’s adding two more games to its service today, bringing the total number of games on the platform to 48. The streaming service has also teased some upcoming games, including one that’s based on its historical drama “Vikings: Valhalla.”

The first game launching today is called Kentucky Route Zero and was developed by Cardboard Computer and published by Annapurna Interactive. The title is an adventure game about a secret highway running through the caves beneath Kentucky. The second game launching today is called Twelve Minutes and was developed by 24 Bit Games and published by Annapurna Interactive. The game sees players trying to escape a time-loop nightmare and features the voices of celebrities James McAvoy, Daisy Ridley and Willem Dafoe.

As for the upcoming titles, Netflix says the Vikings: Valhalla game will see players take their place as leaders of fierce Viking clans and build settlements and expand their influence across the continent. Netflix plans to launch the game in the first quarter of 2023.

Also launching next year is a new game called Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge. As described by Netflix, “players will be able to kick shell with Leonardo, Raphael, Donatello, Michelangelo or other familiar friends in this totally tubular ’80s-inspired beat ’em up.” The streaming service says players will find old-school gameplay enhanced with new fighting mechanics and discover adventures with a new story mode.

Netflix has noted that it’s still early days for its mobile gaming efforts, and new games can take years to build, which indicates that its long-term vision for mobile gaming goes far beyond the more casual gaming releases it has made available to subscriberssince launching Netflix Gamesin November 2021.

Data reported in August showed that 1.7 million users play Netflix games daily, which is less than 1% of its streaming subscriber base. Netflix is focused on increasing this number and establishing itself as a real player in the world of gaming. At TechCrunch Disrupt in October, Netflix VP of Gaming Mike Verdu revealed that Netflix was opening a new studio in Southern California and is also venturing into cloud gaming. Since then, Netflix has also acquired Spry Fox, a Seattle-based independent gaming studio focused on cozy games.

Netflix rolls out two more mobile games, will release a ‘Vikings: Valhalla’ game next year by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch

Out where delivery trucks and full-size cargo planes don’t make a lot of sense, drones proliferating — they may never deliver your burrito, but could soon be indispensable for transporting medicine and emergency supplies. Australian drone logistics company Swoop Aero is celebrating new milestones and funding as it plans its expansion to more markets.

Swoop has been providing transport and delivery of medical materials — medications as well as things like samples for labs — in south Malawi, DR Congo, and other locations for the last three years, and recently delivered its millionth item and completed its 20,000th flight.

This success has led to USAID awarding $1.5 million to Swoop, which will fuel in part the company’s expansion to the rest of the country. That’s on top of a just-announced $10 million addition — from latecomer Levitate Capital — to its $16 million Series B from earlier this year.

CEO Eric Peck told TechCrunch that the company formed when he, formerly an Air Force officer, met his co-founder, a roboticist, and they both wondered whether autonomous aircraft could actually find a role in today’s complex logistics world. Clearly the answer was yes, but the segment they found practical wasn’t the urban one.

“The misconception is we’re going to replace every truck and car – what it’s actually about is the integration of air transport into the logistics infrastructure that exists right now,” Peck said. For a typical delivery provider serving a wide area, “if we do their 30 hardest to reach locations, we can halve the road miles they have to do.”

They ended up designing and building their own aircraft from scratch: a medium-size electric UAV that can cruise up to 100 miles with a 10-pound payload, land vertically, and uses parts so easily swappable that it can be converted from a cargo to a scientific or rescue craft in a matter of minutes. They are also all powered by off-grid energy: solar and whatever else can be stood up at a given location.

Swoop’s strategy is to establish a ground presence and bring a number of aircraft online to serve a highly specific need. “If you’re the minister of a country, whether it’s Austrialia or Malawi, you say ‘we want to be able to do 300 high priority deliveries a month.’ We aim to hit a cost point, but also 10x the level of service provided. Like a hospital that gets a pickup once a month, we would do every day. It can have a huge impact,” said Peck.

Once they are in regular operation, the company can expand the fleet and diversity its customers and service. Turns out there’s plenty of latent demand for things like power line inspections, mapping and monitoring, wildfire tracking, and disaster response. Often something you must charter a helicopter flight for generally can be done for a tiny fraction of the price by a drone.

The company has learned as it grew: the aircraft itself has gone through five generations as they’ve observed them in use and received feedback from customers. And it’s not at all obvious how exactly one should go about building a state-of-the-art, renewable-energy-powered public-private partnership drone subsidiary in any country, let alone in a dozen of them across the globe.

“There’s a lot of learning to be done in how you actually deploy a drone logistics point. Capital has been focused on R&D, learning to deploy at scale, how to manufacture the aircraft at scale,” Peck explained.

What they’ve arrived at is about an 80/20 split between running their own networks and leasing the aircraft to other operators. They’ve learned to cut costs where necessary — landing zones are “typically a big QR code on the ground held down with sandbags” and being able to recharge and repurpose aircraft quickly and cheaply has been key, hence the modular build.

The company is now working with various partners, both private and government, to expand. Peck said they plan to raise a new $40 million round to build out ten new networks — including in the U.S., where regulations are tight. The plan will be to provide the tech to existing players (think UPS and specialty firms for medical transport, etc) first, but it’s clear that the needs of countries around the world are fundamentally similar.

Certainly a few states would be happy for the help with wildfire monitoring and infrastructure inspection. Hell, with great whites back in New England they might want to take advantage of Swoop’s shark patrol services.

Swoop Aero’s drones hit a million items delivered as the company raises for expansion by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch

Dataiku is the latest well-financed startup to suffer from macroeconomic headwinds, raising new capital at a significantly reduced valuation. The company today announced that it raised $200 million in a Series F round led by Wellington Management at a $3.7 billion valuation, down from the $4.6 billion valuation that Dataiku received in August 2021.

A filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission shows that Dataiku intends to close its Series F with as much as $275 million. The $200 million from Wellington bring the New York-based startup’s total raised to roughly $600 million.

In a statement, Wellington Management’s Matt Withelier said: “Dataiku’s proven track record, management team, growth trajectory, and customer roster, positions the company to scale AI to new heights. We are pleased to partner and contribute to their impressive journey. Dataiku has taken a leadership position helping enterprises put massive datasets to work at unprecedented speed and creating a culture of AI focused on delivering compounding business results.”

The bump in the road comes as something of a surprise. Dataiku — which sells tools to help customers build, test and deploy AI and analytics applications — has managed to avoid major layoffs, unlike competitors such as DataRobot. And earlier this year, Dataiku signaled to investors that it had no plans to reorient its growth strategy, revealing its annual recurring revenue for the first time ($150 million) and hiring a new chief financial officer — the first external addition to its C-suite.

The hiring of the new CFO, Adam Towns, fueled speculation that Dataiku was eying an IPO in the near term; Towns previously helped take Mimecast to the public market. But the announcement of the Series F suggests a listing may in fact be a ways off.

There’s signs VC investments in AI startups are cooling. A recent PitchBook report shows that deal value growth in AI startups was down 27.8% quarter over quarter in Q2 2022, with overall investments reaching $20.2 billion across 1,340 deals. Year to date, VCs have funneled $48.2 billion into AI startups across over 3,000 deals — which sounds healthy but actually represents a 20.9% year-over-year dip.

As per a press release, Dataiku’s customer base now stands at over 500 companies, including more than 150 of the world’s largest enterprises. They’re using the platform for use cases like predictive maintenance, supply chain optimization, quality control in engineering and marketing optimization, according to Dataiku co-founder and CEO Florian Douetteau.

“Enterprises overwhelmingly understand that now is the time to embrace AI — or risk falling behind,” Douetteau said in a statement. “Our ability to attract new, market leading investors, like Wellington, in this challenging environment underscores the strength of our solutions, our world-class team, and the tremendous opportunities ahead. We are on the cusp of a massive market transformation with AI at the heart of it — and we are ready to meet the moment.”

Dataiku, which launched in Paris in 2013, competes with a number of companies for dominance in the AI and big data analytics space. The more formidable rivals include Databricks, which raised $1.6 billion in August 2021, and the aforementioned DataRobot, which secured $300 at a $6.3 billion valuation in July 2021.

In recent years, Dataiku has sought to expand its pool of startup and small- and medium-sized business customers, introducing a fully managed version of its data science platform called Dataiku Online. Dataiku has also launched new tools that let companies design and deploy AI and analytics apps, turn raw data into advanced analytics and design machine learning models for use in their own apps and services.

AI and analytics platform Dataiku raises $200M at a reduced valuation by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

The U.S. Midwest generates a lot of wealth and is home to myriad huge corporations. With corporations come pension funds, foundations and other collections of great wealth. One of the ways that those pots of cash are being invested is through venture capital, which means the money flows to the coasts — New York, Boston, Silicon Valley. For the past decade, Gener8tor has been working to shift that by spinning up accelerators in local communities that have money but are underserved in terms of startup support.

We spoke with the Gener8tor founders about why they are passionate about thinking about the startup ecosystem a little differently.

“One of the challenges we face that I don’t think is talked about enough is that much of the capital in Boston or Silicon Valley comes from pension funds and foundations based in our communities,” said Joe Kirgues, co-founder of Gener8tor. “These communities are taking their dollars and investing it elsewhere. And then bringing back pennies on the dollar to do charity in our communities. And it’s fueling a lot of the discrepancies we see in the country.”

Gener8tor has flown under the radar a little despite putting a lot of points on the board: It has been operating for more than a decade and has had 34 exits (including Pretty Litter, Curate, GrocerKey and Bright Cellars). More than 1,000 companies have cycled through its accelerator, and it was named 2022’s VC firm of the year by The International Trade Council. And yet, the name isn’t as well-known as other comparably sized accelerators.

Gener8tor has some impressive stats under its belt: 80% of its startups are outside of major tech hubs, and more than two-thirds of the companies in the accelerators are led by underrepresented founders. It’s a hell of an operation, too. Headquartered in Madison, Wisconsin, the accelerator has 147 full-time employees, accelerators in 41 locations across 22 states, and $1.3 billion in total funding deployed.

The company told me that 1,068 startups have graduated from one of its 104 annual accelerator programs, including:

Gener8tor investment accelerator is a standard cash-for-equity accelerator that has helped more than 200 companies raise more than $800 million.
Gener8tor gBETA is a free accelerator that accepts five startups into a seven-week program. More than 700 companies have gone through gBETA.
Gener8tor Skills is a partnership with Gener8tor, Microsoft and TechSpark that focuses on upskilling workers who want to train for roles in high-demand fields such as customer service or software development. The company said more than 1,000 people have gone through the program, with half securing new careers in the past 24 months.
The Gener8tor OnRamp Conference is a series of vertical-specific events, including education, insurance, agriculture, manufacturing, and healthcare.

As a business, the company claims to be doing just fine, too, showing some pretty impressive investment metrics:

I talked with the co-founders, Troy Vosseller and Joe Kirgues, to learn more about how it all hangs together and what it sees as the future of its operations.

“Both Joe and I were lawyers, and we met working on transactions together, both on the startup and the investor side. Joe and I hit it off, and shared the perspective that there was a lot of lacking efficiency for an entrepreneur to go from an idea to incorporating a business, growing that business, raising venture capital, so on and so forth,” Vosseller said. “We’re both admirers of the accelerator model, starting with Paul Graham and YC. Reading his original essays about the program provided a lot of inspiration. And it dawned on us that we could do that here in Wisconsin. Joe and I quit our jobs. We found a group of angel investors out of the Milwaukee area who share that same vision and passion. And we’ve been doing Gener8tor ever since then — that was 10 years ago.”

The team’s first program was in Milwaukee in 2012, and for a while they alternated running annual programs in Milwaukee and Madison. Work with startups, invest in startups, help them grow. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Although YC may have been the inspiration for Gener8tor, the duo tells me things were a little different a decade ago.

“I think there were more local accelerators between 2012 and 2014 than there are today. To some degree, there has been a sifting and winnowing. I think the same is playing out on the national scene. I think there’s been some coalescence around a handful of programs,” Vosseller explained. “We’re bumping into the likes Techstars, 500 Startups, MassChallenge and Alchemist, of course, but it’s a much smaller grouping than what it was 10 years ago.”

Both Kirgues and Vosseller are obviously passionate about driving local ecosystems forward.

“My joke is that when you write $20,000 checks to a bunch of 20-somethings and expect them to build a $100 million company from it, that’s what it’s like to be crazy, but not self-aware. Building a startup is a hard task in any market, but even more so in these nascent ecosystems. What we found is if you try to close the soft skill gap first — if you get the founders in the room with investors, and if you help them prepare for it — there’s just as many bright people born in a community as any other,” Kirgues said. “If you work on solving that problem, just on a one-to-one basis, you can get a lot further than then I think we realized at the time.”

The duo became hyper-focused on building up emerging ecosystems, starting with Madison and Milwaukee, and later broadening the approach to more and more cities.

Gener8tor is the biggest startup accelerator you’ve never heard of by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch

Don’t miss your opportunity to demonstrate your expertise — and teach what you know so well — to hundreds of budding and bootstrapping entrepreneurs. Where? At the TechCrunch Early Stage founder-focused summit on April 20 in Boston, Massachusetts.

If you’re an experienced, later-stage startup founder or ecosystem expert who can offer essential or game-changing advice, we encourage you to throw your hat into the Audience Choice voting ring. Apply here today.

Here’s how the Audience Choice selection process works.

Submit an application outlining the content you’d like to present by January 6. After Team TechCrunch vets the applications, it will select the participants for Audience Choice voting. TC readers will vote for the sessions they want at TC Early Stage.

Here’s the timeline to keep in mind:

Application deadline: January 6
Notify Audience Choice participants: January 23
Voting period: January 30 through February 17
Notify winners: By February 22

Share your hard-earned knowledge and establish yourself as a thought leader with the up-and-coming startup generation. Apply to Audience Choice right now.

TC Early Stage, which takes place on April 20, 2023, in Boston, Massachusetts, provides access to essential information, resources and community connection to help budding, bootstrapping entrepreneurs reach their potential. Buy a pass now — just $149 while supplies last — and join us in Boston!

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TC Early Stage 2023? Contact our sponsorship sales team byfilling out this form.

Show what you know at the TechCrunch Early Stage founder summit by Lauren Simonds originally published on TechCrunch

Ticketmaster has now enraged the passionate fans of two of the world’s biggest acts: Taylor Swift and Bad Bunny.

Last weekend in Mexico City, the Puerto Rican rapper performed two sold-out shows at the 85,000-seat Azteca Stadium, but over a thousand fans who purchased tickets via Ticketmaster were turned away. Ticketmaster issued a statement saying that ticket holders who were denied entry will be refunded, then claimed that the cause of the problem was fake tickets.

But Mexican regulators tell a different story.

Ricardo Sheffield, Head of Mexico’s Office of the Federal Prosecutor for the Consumer (PROFECO), said in a Spanish-language interview with Radio Fómula that these tickets weren’t fake — Ticketmaster issued all of these tickets, after all. What happened, from Sheffield’s point of view, is that Ticketmaster simply oversold the event. Sheffield said that in addition to full ticket refunds, affected customers will get a 20% compensation fee. PROFECO will also fine Ticketmaster up to 10% of the company’s sales for the year in Mexico.

Sheffield said that about 1,600 fans on Friday and 110 fans on Saturday were turned away despite having tickets.

U.S. regulators are also investigating Ticketmaster’s parent company, Live Nation Entertainment. In November, the Justice Department opened an antitrust investigation into the entertainment giant.

“As we have stated many times in the past, Live Nation takes its responsibilities under the antitrust laws seriously and does not engage in behaviors that could justify antitrust litigation, let alone orders that would require it to alter fundamental business practices,” the company responded in a statement.

Consumers have long bemoaned the frustrating process of securing tickets to a high-demand show on Ticketmaster — it’s one thing when you lose out tickets to other fans, but oftentimes, a show will sellout within minutes, usually due to competition from bots — and then, thousands of tickets instantly reappear on resale sites like Vivid Seats, SeatGeek and StubHub for a way higher price. In the case of the Taylor Swift Eras tour presale, Ticketmaster blamed bots for its issues, despite issuing presale codes to a select group of “verified fans.”

“Historically, we’ve been able to manage huge volume coming into the site to shop for tickets, so those with Verified Fan codes have a smooth shopping process,” Ticketmaster said in a statement. “However, this time the staggering number of bot attacks as well as fans who didn’t have codes drove unprecedented traffic on our site, resulting in 3.5 billion total system requests – 4x our previous peak.”

In total, over two million Taylor Swift tickets were sold on November 15, which broke Ticketmaster’s record for most tickets ever sold for an artist in a single day. But so many fans couldn’t access secure tickets at all, or spent hours waiting in unprecedented virtual lines, only to be turned away.

To quote Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan, Ticketmaster’s meltdown during the presale for the Taylor Swift’s Eras tour “converted more Gen Z’ers into antimonopolists overnight than anything I could have done.”

Mexican regulators are fining Ticketmaster after Bad Bunny concert fiasco by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch

Amazon today is introducing a small handful of new features for its digital assistant Alexa that aim to make the device more accessible. The company is launching two new ways to interact with Alexa without speaking including support for Gestures on Echo Show devices that will users to interact with the device by raising their hand — something that can also come in handy for anyone using Echo while cooking who want to quickly dismiss a timer without having to speak. In addition, Amazon is rolling out text-to-speech options and a way to turn on all closed captioning features at once across devices.

The new features are the latest to arrive in a push to make Alexa a more accessible tool, and follow the fall launch of a “Tap to Alexa” option for Fire tablets that allow users to interact with the voice assistant without speaking.

With Gestures, Amazon says users will be able to hold up their hand — palm facing the camera — to dismiss timers on the Echo Show 8 (2nd Gen.) or 10 (3rd Gen) devices. Beyond enabling nonverbal customers to use the device, Amazon also envisions a common scenario where users in the kitchen are cooking while listening to music and don’t want to have to scream over their tunes to be heard by Alexa or touch the screen with messy hands. The gesture could give them an easier way to interact with Alexa, in that case.

Gestures are not enabled by default — you’ll have to visit Settings, then Device Options to access the option. (Presumably, by calling it “Gestures” and not “Gesture,” Amazon has other plans in store for this feature down the road.)

To work, Gestures uses on-device processing to detect the presence of a raised hand during an active timer, Amazon said. Users will not have to enroll in other visual identification features like Visual ID, the Echo Show’s facial recognition system, to use it.

The company is also launching text-to-speech functionality to the new Tap To Alexa feature, which today provides customers with a dashboard of Alexa commands on the Echo’s screen which they can tap to launch. With text-to-speech, customers will now be able to type out phrases on an on-screen keyboard to have them spoken aloud by their Echo Show. These commands can also be saved as shortcut tiles and customized with their own icon and colors.

The feature aims to help customers with speech disabilities, or who are nonverbal or nonspeaking who can use text-to-speech to communicate with others in their home, for example by typing out “I’m hungry.”

The third new addition is called Consolidated Captions, and allows customers to turn on Call Captioning,Closed Captioning, andAlexa Captions at once across all their supported Echo Show devices. This enables customers to turn on captions for things like Alexa calls and captions for Alexa’s responses, which helps those who deaf, hard of hearing, or who are using Alexa in loud or noisy environments, Amazon says.

This feature is enabled by tapping Settings, then Accessibility, and selecting “Captions.”

The new features come at a time when Amazon is trying to determine how to proceed with Alexa, whose division at the company saw significant layoffs and, per anInsider report, is said to be on pace to lose Amazon around $10 billion this year as opportunities to monetize the platform, like voice apps known as Skills, have failed to gain traction with consumers. Alexa owners also tend to only use the device for basic tasks, like playing music, operating smart home devices, using timers and alarms, and getting weather information, among other things.

More recently, Amazon has been positioning its Echo Show devices as more of a family hub or alternative to the kitchen TV. Its wall-mounted Echo Show 15, for example, offers widgets for things like to-do lists and shopping lists and just rolled out Fire TV streaming.

Amazon says the new Echo Show features are rolling out now.

Amazon’s Echo Show adds more accessibility features, including ‘Gestures’ and text-to-speech by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

Ask Alan Shreve why he founded Ngrok, a service that helps developers share sites and apps running on their local machines or servers, and he’ll tell you it was to solve a tough-to-grok (pun fully intended) infrastructure problem he encountered while at Twilio. As an engineer there, Shreve was developing on webhooks — automated messages sent from apps when something happens — without an appropriately-tailored development environment, which slowed the deployment process.

Ngrok was his solution. An open source package that grew into a distributed platform, Ngrok aims to collapse various networking technologies into a unified layer, letting developers deliver apps the same way regardless of whether they’re deployed to the public cloud, serverless platforms, their own data center or internet of things devices.

After being bootstrapped for seven years, Ngrok today announced that it raised $50 million in a Series A round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from Coatue. Shreve tells TechCrunch that, with the fresh capital, Ngrok will grow operations and “make continued investments” to improve its core product offering.

“Developers tape together various open source projects, home-grown proxy layers and combine them with disparate services from cloud-specific vendors like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform and content delivery networks like Cloudflare. Developers are required to configure unnecessarily low-layer networking resources like IPs, DNS, VPNs and firewalls to deliver their applications,” Shreve told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Ngrok allows developers to avoid that complexity.”

Ngrok acts as a “reverse proxy” for services and apps, fronting web services running in clouds or private networks or on a local dev machine. It gives developers internet access to private systems normally hidden behind a firewall, providing an internet-accessible address anyone can get to and linking the other side of the “tunnel” to functionality running locally.

Effectively, Ngrok adds connectivity, security and observability features to existing apps without requiring any code changes, including features like load balancing and encryption. With Ngrok, developers can deploy or test apps against a development backend, building demo websites without having to deploy them. Or they can access internet of things devices in the field, connecting to private-cloud software remotely.

“When developers build applications and APIs, they need to deliver them to customers on the internet. Ingress is the service that provides application delivery and makes your service available securely to its customers. Ngrok’s ingress is [an] application’s front door,” Shreve said. “The way developers build applications has fundamentally changed. Microservice architectures, serverless platforms and other shifts in the industry have led to a proliferation of new APIs and apps which need their own ingress in different environments.”

Indeed, Shreve appears to have grokked it (I’ll see myself out), growing Ngrok’s user base to five million developers — 30,000 of which are paying customers. Shreve wouldn’t disclose revenue figures, but he said that revenue “doubled” year-over-year thanks in part to well-paying clients like Databricks, Zendesk, Copado, Klaviyo and SonarSource.

Ngrok competes to a degree with startups like Tailscale, ZeroTier, Netmaker and Defined Networking’s Nebula — some of them are well funded. In May, Tailscale raised $100 million for its mesh networking technology that can be installed on a single server and used as a way to share software services.

But if Shreve is concerned, he wasn’t obvious about it.

“Most organizations manage 200 to 1,000 apps. At that scale, delivering apps more quickly moves the needle by keeping developers focused on solving real business problems and not dealing with networking complexities,” Shreve continued. “Ngrok’s API-first ingress-as-a-service platform enables developers to deliver faster by building on top of a single solution across all of these platforms.”

Lightspeed Venture Partners’ Guru Chahal added: “More developers are entering the industry and building more applications, most of which will be delivered over the internet as software-as-a-service services. Today, this involves a complex mix of networking and security technologies that is expensive, time-consuming to manage, and, quite frankly, does not scale … We invested in Ngrok because it is solving this challenge. Ngrok dramatically simplifies how apps are delivered over the internet to users. A developer can deliver their app to users in a secure and scalable manner with one click or a single line of code.”

Ngrok employs 59 people currently across its offices in San Francisco and Seattle and remotely. It’s actively hiring.

Ngrok, a service to help devs deploy sites, services and apps, raises $50M by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch